In the International Media Centre there are enormous screens around the press pool area. When there’s a press conference or major briefing, the screens show the closed-circuit video of those events, but most of the time there isn’t a press event, so instead they show a live feed of whatever’s appropriate to set the tone. At first it was a long-distance shot of Huntsville, but now it’s camera feeds of the CN Tower or the city skyline.
At 1 a.m. last night, one of the video techs stopped by while we were organizing our material from the day for a bit of a chat on his way out. The discussion eventually turned to the big screens. “Yeah, it’s crazy. This is pure HD, it’s not compressed. They’re sending it with microwave transmitters.” When we asked him how much that cost, he shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe two-fifty, three hundred a second?”
The photo above was snapped in one-thirtieth of a second. You do the math.